I have found out from my previous research on the Korean History that though the North and South Korean languages are different to some degrees, one can understand the other. However, what intrigues me is the use of loan words in Korean. The North Korean government has taken the initiative to manually ban loan words and create new Korean words for those words. On the other hand, the Korean language has an increasing number of phonological adaptations of English words with an already existing pool of Chinese and Japanese loan words.
If I was given a research grant to conduct a linguistic study, I will focus my research on Korean Loan words and its relationship to the changing technological environment and culture as a result of globalization. I will start my study by researching an approximated number of loan words in total in the Korean Language and draw the connections between the language’s development chronologically and identify the specific features of loans and potentially exact words that might have developed during each period.
The different structural components that we have identified during class can appear in this study through the study of the impact of these loan words on the grammatical structure of sentences and on the morphology of the Korean language, specifically “Konglish.” I would also try to identify more closely the lexical and grammatical morphemes, and also derivational and inflectional morphology of Korean.
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Loan words and romantic nationalistic discourses on linguistic purity do not go together. I would be curious when and why this seeming need for linguistic purity came about in the north.
On another note, as someone who is outside the community of native speakers, do you enjoy language more when it is what nationalists call pure? I imagine you might pick up a source from both the north and south and see which you enjoy reading more. To me, it is, to a small degree, disappointing that the English word for number is used so often in the languages I study. It is as if cultures are rejecting themselves in favor for an English alternative for which they already have a word.